5 Resources Every Product Designer Need

As a product designer, you must work under strict deadlines. There, technology lends a helping hand. Various web design tools are available these days that can save your time, energy, and money. Such tools can streamline your workflow and enhance your efficiency. It takes a pain of dull and repetitive tasks. The result? Well, you can focus more on creativity and user-friendly web designs.

The latest web design tools can simplify your designing process and enable you to come up with an elegant UI design. There are many tools available these days but out of them, we find the following five design tools highly useful for your web design projects.

Sketch

It is the most obvious and sought-after tool among the designers. Probably, every designer knows about this Bohemian Coding’s vector UI design tool. But here is a twist: Still a lot of web designers rely on Photoshop for UI design, though they have an excellent tool called Sketch in hand!

Maybe, it is hard to leave Photoshop after working on it for several years. Or probably, the web designers find it hard to learn something new as an option to Photoshop. We believe that you should at least give Sketch a try! Once you will use it, it would be difficult for you to leave! Sketch can readily sort all your documents. You can easily make revisions on this platform.

As Sketch is a vector-based app, its file sizes are smaller as compared to Photoshop. What is more interesting is, Sketch has a great built-in grid system that makes the process of designing an interface much easier. When you use it, you will find Photoshop more complicated and switch to Sketch.

You can also utilize hundreds of plugins that can make your life easier and smoother. The Sketch community is very large. There is a plugin for everything in the community. Though for photo editing Photoshop or Lightroom has no match, the winner of overall web design is Sketch. The tool also comes with a cleaner and user-friendly UI.

Avocode

If you are one of the front-end developers who code websites or applications from Photoshop of Sketch designs, then Avocode is for you! It makes your workflow extremely easy. The makers of CSS Hat and PNG Hat are behind this tool, so you will not get surprised to see that they have taken the exporting process one step further in Avocode.

You can use its Photoshop plugin to sync PSD into Avocode with just a single click. This makes Avocode more special than other apps that allow you to export assets.

Avocode can quickly analyze your PSD or Sketch file and bring everything into an elegant UI design. It offers you a complete control over the way you export assets, including SVG exporting. Avocode considers SVG exporting as standard. You can also click elements in the design. Avocode enables you to copy and paste the code into a selected text editor.

In brief, Avocode facilitates the users by giving everything they require for coding. For example, it offers a design preview, access to all layers, and export assets. What makes Avocode more powerful is-it eliminates the requirement to use Photoshop or Sketch. The current workflow depends mainly on these two tools- Photoshop and Sketch. Avocode is an answer to their dominance in the design domain.

Many enthusiastic designers use this tool to turn both PSDs and Sketch files into interactive designs. Such designs can act as a foundation for the website. With Avocode, there is no need to take the pain of developing design with minute details, as the tool takes care of it!

Zeplin

At times, you find it cumbersome to hand over design assets to developers. This is because they do not share the same software as yours every time. So, even if you have put your efforts in preparing layered and annotated Photoshop mockups, chances are they may end up as flattened files. When they use it in website development, your designing efforts get lost.

Here comes Zeplin. It cleverly mitigates this painful experience. The tool translates any Photoshop or Sketch files into a free Mac, Windows, or a web-based application. It also provides the quick reference for colors, dimensions, and fonts. What’s more, it can also generate CSS and style guides. You can save your time significantly with this tool. Just show this tool to your developer friends. They would also like it!

Pattern Lab

Well, this is a brainchild of two design enthusiasts Dave Olsen and Brad Frost. Interestingly, this pattern-driven design tool is based on the concept of Atomic Design. It has a clear message: You should break your design down into the smallest parts, or say atoms. You can then combine them to form bigger and reusable components, say, molecules and organisms. In a way, you can have usable templates from your own design!

Pattern Lab can go beyond stitching UI components together. It also enables you to nest UI patterns inside each other. You can design with dynamic data using this tool. It also contains device-agnostic viewpoint resizing tools that can help you make a responsive design. Designers can expand the tool further as per their requirements for the tool is completely extensible.

Canva

Here comes one of the most favorite design tools. Though we are just covering five tools for the designers, we cannot restrict ourselves from mentioning Canva! If you want to make an infographic quickly and with ease, Canva can help you out. It’s a free and browser-based tool. What makes it more useful is the fact that both designers and non-designers can use it without many hurdles. You can create cool graphics for both print as well as the web by using Canva. And yes, you can also make beautiful images with this tool!

Conclusion

These five tools would help product designers a lot. But, we have taken only five tools from a vast collection. Which are the other tools that you would like to add in this list? Let us know your thoughts.

Happy Designing!

Pratik Shah is Creative Director at Brush Your Ideas, Web-to-Print Software Solutions. He has good experience and expertise in the domains of ecommerce and web-to-print technology. He loves to write about ecommerce, web-to-print industry, mobile app design and development, website design and development, and responsive design. Brush Your Ideas offers a customized product designer extension for Magento. As a ready to integrate Web-to-Print store, the company aims to set up as a one-stop destination for businesses of all sizes. Brush Your Ideas meets the requirements of the global clientele and acts as their IT partner. Social Media Profiles: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter

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